Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/124

 in all the fierce light that beat upon him throughout the most eventful, trying, and perilous sixteen years of the nation's history.

Never having had "a policy to enforce against the will of the people," he never betrayed a cause or a friend, and the people will never betray or desert him. Vilified and reviled, ruthlessly aspersed by numberless presses, not in other lands, but in his own, the assaults upon him have strengthened and seasoned his hold upon the public heart. The ammunition of calumny has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned; its force is spent; and General Grant's name will glitter as a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish it will have moldered in forgotten graves and their memories and epitaphs have vanished utterly.

There is no field of human activity, responsibility, or reason in which rational beings object to Grant, because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting, and because he has had unequaled experience, making him exceptionally competent and fit. From the man who shoes your horse to the lawyer who pleads your case, the officer who manages your railway, the doctor into whose hands you give your life, or the minister who seeks to save your soul, whom now do you reject because you have tried him and by his works have known him? What makes the presidential office an exception to all things else in the common sense to be applied to